Book Review: “The Painted Man” Peter V Brett

The Painted Man, Peter V Brett, Harper Voyager Paperback, ISBN 978-0-00-727614-1

Arlen lives with his parents on their small farmstead, half a day’s ride from the isolated hamlet of Tibbet’s Brook. As dusk falls each evening, a mist rises from the ground promising death to any foolish enough to brave the coming darkness. For hungry demons materialise from the vapours to feed, and as the shadows lengthen, humanity is forced to take shelter behind magical wards and pray that their protection holds until dawn.

But when Arlen’s world is shattered by the demon plague, he realises that it is fear, rather than the monsters, which truly cripples humanity. Only by conquering their own terror can they ever hope to defeat the demons. Now Arlen must risk leaving the safety of his wards to discover a different path and offer humanity a last, fleeting chance of survival. 

I’ve been eager to read this book for some time now – it’s had so many fantastic reviews – so when I saw it in the bookshop, I grabbed it. I’m very pleased that I wasn’t disappointed, as so often happens with much-hyped stories.

This is a demon of a novel: it grabs you by the throat and pulls you in from the start, and spits you out at the end, exhausted and emotionally drained. I went through this novel in two evenings, with illicit, snatched readings in the intervening day whenever I got the chance – I couldn’t keep my mind out of it, and even now it’s still turning in my head. I might have to adopt a policy of not reading trilogies until all 3 books are published: to have to wait so long for the next book (already on pre-order) AND THEN THE FINALE is pure torture.

Brett has built a world so coherent and convincing, and a trio of characters – Arlen, Rojer and Leesha – who are both engaging and credible, so that the unfolding of their stories is as enthralling as an enchantment and as gripping as a boa constrictor. The writing is spare and stark and beautiful, and the descriptions enhance without ever overwhelming the action in the foreground: Brett makes every word of every scene work for its place, and the result is a wonderfully tight and compelling novel.

In this world, there is a very good reason to be afraid of the dark, and this is hammered home in the opening scene through the experiences of Arlen, a young boy intimately affected by the demons’ destruction of his community and his family. Through him, we acquire a sense of the dread and terror under which every human must live, the knowledge that in the dark, hope only extends as far as a good ward, and without one, death is certain, slow and terrible. This sense of fear underpins the entire novel, but it is drawn subtly, a deep, cold current inferred from the characters’ actions and so deep ingrained in their thoughts and behaviour that it is a constant. Only at the end are the seeds of change sown, with fear starting to turn to defiance and action against the demons. However, one gets the impression that this is only the beginning of the war, and that there are many more battles to be fought.

Those battles will not only be against demons.

The extra dimension here is that, despite the constant fear of demons, humankind is riven by political factions and the delicate balance of power between church and state, and between duchy and duchy, are under strain. The demons are killing humans faster than they can reproduce, and the economies of the duchies and states are starting to buckle under the strain. The ruling classes are looking to consolidate their own positions, with little care to the plight of common people, and the church preaches a doctrine of sin and punishment by demon plague, a puritanical and sometime hypocritical position that does little to lighten the burden of sorrow on the people to whom it ministers.

However, this church also delivers the prophesy of a deliverer, who will come to rid the world of demons and reinstate a peace and prosperity that has been long missing. Into this prophecy, Arlen’s decision to fight rather than flee unfolds. His position outside of society – one of the few willing to brave nights in the dark with no warded walls between himself and the demons – leads him to uncover what might be the salvation of humanity.  This puts him into opposition with the established church, who will either condemn him as an imposter or, worse (in his eyes), attempt to force him into the role of ‘Deliverer’.

It also runs counter to the beliefs and needs of  the ultra-religious Krasians who would rather see him dead than admit that the deliverer might arise from outside their clans. Their fanatical culture has strong Islamic overtones, and whilst the use of prejudiced, thinly-disguised stereotypical portrayals of traditional Islamic cultures as inherently evil/tyrannical in fantasy is not something I enjoy – it plays too much to the cheap seats in terms of ticking the box for an easily identifiable ‘evil empire’ that will both appeal to and strike a chord with a contemporary audience -  this one is more well-balanced than most and does make some attempt to demonstrate the effect of an absolute commitment to faith that makes the importance of the temporal world secondary to the hereafter. This dependence both drives and defines the Krasian’s outlook on life, and whilst it may have unpleasant cultural implications for non-warriors and those unable to achieve the perfection of faith, it nonetheless highlights the vacillations and hypocrises of the Northern kingdoms and places the Krasians in direct opposition to them – the more so at the end of the novel, which promises to expand the personal conflicts of this into a wider, political conflagration in the next.

Arlen’s single-mindedness contrasts well with the other major players in this story. Rojer is orphaned by a demon attack and subsequently brought up by a Jongleur (a jester, or bard) and follows in his trade. Leesha becomes an Herb Gatherer, a medicine woman, for her village after her mother and betrothed betray her trust. Both of these characters, again, exist outside of their society’s comforts, though they are important contributors to that same comfort, but neither of them posess the same certainties and determination as Arlen. Their quest for meaning and purpose both contrasts with and complements Arlen’s driven hunt, and when the three strands of their very different stories come together to make a single, satisfying whole, the result makes for a powerful, convincing finale to this story.

Like so many who have read this already, I loved this story. I am so excited about reading the next one, I can hardly bear to wait until August …

Rejection: the death of hope

Spent some time updating my submissions spreadsheet this evening, following another pair of rejection letters in the last week. So, my stats are now 10 stories, 34 submissions with 30 rejections, 4 still awaiting response and a total of 1,668 days of hope.

No matter what I try to tell myself, rejection hurts.

Rejection by Slushpup (Flickr Creative Commons)

 

There are all sorts of stories I can tell myself to try to ease it:

1) 30 rejections and 10 stories is really not all that much, compared to other (successful) writers. I’ve got to expect it to take some time.

2) Rejections are part of the writer’s life, everyone gets them, I might as well get over it

3) I’m aiming my stories at pro markets, so I’m competing against established writers, and the very best of the newcomers for a couple of spaces in each edition.

4) Sometimes, the rejection is more because of the ‘fit’ of stories within a particular issue than a weakness of the story itself

There are more. They’re all good stories, and there’s a measure of truth in each one. Not one of them is convincing, though. Not one of them really, truly takes away that instant sting of pain, the death of hope, that each rejection brings.

Perhaps each one is a little dart that will harden my hide so that eventually, rejections will become so much water off this duck’s back, perhaps it will continue to hurt so much.

Every time I work on a story, edit it, take the time to look around, review the available markets, see which one fits best with that story, and send that story out, I am convinced that this time, it will place. This time, it will hit the mark, make the breakthrough and I will see it in print and I’ll be able to point to it in pride and say “I did it”. And hope that it will be the first of many, the beginning of my steps on the path of a career as an author.

So each time the story comes back with a “Thanks for your submission, but it’s not quite right for us”, it’s the death of that bright hope. The fire dies and leaves me with ashes in my mouth, and I can’t help but mourn its passing. And then, there must be the act of courage to scrape together enough hope and optimism to send the story out again – sometimes with a rework, sometimes without – and allow myself to hope again.

Sometimes I wonder why it means so much to me. Why the continual striving for publication, even in the face of almost impossible odds, against a vast sea of untold talent striving for the same goal? Why the need to see my work recognised and published in a respected magazine? Why are the stories I tell myself not sufficient to keep to myself – why the need to share them? Why the need to strive and win the prize of publication? What does it matter?

I’ve never really subscribed to the ‘if I’m not going to win, I won’t play’ school of thought. Regardless of whether or not I ever achieve publication, I will always write. It is too great a love, too deeply ingrained in me, to ever be able to stop doing it. I have terrors of blindness, so that I can no longer read or write, more so than loss of hearing or any other sense of smell.

So it’s not for the competition, for a need to win or excel, to earn plaudits for their own sake.

I liken it more to a rite of passage, a painful initiation into the guild to which I am still serving my apprenticeship, something I must endure to become a journeyman. One day, I hope to become a master of the craft, and to do so I must pass the tests.

Magpie’s Laundry

Magpie’s Laundry is my (very) small business. Originally, I was a declutterer and a lot of my work came through local estate agents for people selling their houses. Most of the textile work I did was a sideline of that decluttering / home organisation business – always in demand, but never the main strand of what I did, although I have always loved working with textiles.

Then along came Bellaboo, so I took some time off, and just as I was getting back into it, the credit crunch hit and the property market crashed and there was no more work. People who were selling were trying to minimise costs rather than maximise profit, and were just not interested in spending on what is seen as a luxury service. (I could debate this, but won’t).

So, that particular door seemed closed, and although we weren’t desperate for money, I kind of liked my financial independence and not feeling I needed to account for/justify my spending, so I wasn’t sure what to do next.

Key To The Open Door by Tawheed Manzoor (Flickr Commons)

The answer rather presented itself: I’d carried on doing a fair amount of textile work for various friends, family and other contacts whilst I’d had my ‘time-off’ with Bellaboo, because it generated a little income and it was manageable from the home studio space I already had. About that time, and almost by chance, I got hooked up with a pair of craft galleries via a couple of close contacts, and it’s kind of rolled from there. I’m about as busy with it as I want to be, but I’ve recently been going through a re-evaluation of what I want to do in my life as a whole, and where I want to go, and so naturally the whole Magpie’s business has come under that microscope.

It took a post from WAHMBizBuilder about the Marketing Funnel to bring things into perspective for me. Marketing has never been my strong point, mostly because I’m not great at self-promotion and networking – I’ve always relied on recommendations and word-of-mouth, and a small set of good, influential contacts in the past. So, although the Finance and admin sides are second nature and of course the product is just in the blood, I realised I’d been missing a trick.

Because the whole textile business has been rather ad-hoc and haphazard, I’ve haven’t had anything approaching a coherent strategy or marketing plan for it. This all sounds rather grand and pompous for the size of the business I run, but I think that the size is irrelevant. What it comes down to, is that I haven’t been maximising the potential of my business because I haven’t really thought my way through the whole thing. I’ve pretty much been depending on the top-end sales of big, commissioned items like the baby-clothes bed-cover patchworks and the wedding-dress counterpanes, bolsters, screens etc, and seeing the smaller items I do as a result of clearing out scraps and stash as almost throwaway items. In the lulls between the commissions, I’ve made them as and when I’ve got time in between personal projects and experimental pieces and haven’t viewed them as important to the overall business.

That needs to change.

I need to be more coherent about what I’m doing, and I need to focus more on the gallery businesses: to that end, I’m going to put a stop to the Etsy experiment. As things stand, I don’t have the time to promote it to get the best results from that marketplace, so it’s pointless working to supply the shop with enough stock to keep it turning over in the way the successful Etsy sellers do. Added to that, I don’t think my photography skills are sufficient to show my creations to their best effect. Maybe, when Bellaboo starts school and I have more time on my hands (I hope!)  then I’ll come back to it, but for now, I’ll let it run its course and that will be that.

Focus will shift onto the marketing model and the product offerings in the various bands of my ‘funnel’ in the two galleries … and also in working through what me ‘free/complimentary’ offering will be. I’m not sure about a newsletter, though that is an option, possibly on a quarterly basis, but what I do know for sure is that I need to revamp the website and attach a blog to it … content-wise, I think the blog will be mostly ‘new collection’ announcements, gallery events, and perhaps some tutorials, so it’ll not be the most frequently updated of creatures – perhaps linked to newsletter it could work? Needs some more thought, but the clarity is there that it is needed, and must be separate from *this* more widely ranging multi-stranded affair.

I also need to be a bit more structured in my approach to the smaller items, and making sure that I’m keeping a steady supply going for these, making sure the funnel remains ’stocked’ at the galleries AND that these are more closely linked in terms of styles and colours to the broad fashion themes and colours of the moment in both home decor and clothing. It means less time for my personal projects, or rather a re-prioritisation so that these creations are seen as a central and necessary part of the business rather than optional extras – because they may well lay the ground for more people coming in and commissioning the bigger, custom pieces from me.

I’ve had an initial discussion with one of the gallery owners in the last week, and she seems enthused and supportive of the idea (after all, more business for me helps her out too ) and suggested that I could offer hand-embroidery on these smaller items as an optional extra – great idea, I have *no idea* why I didn’t think of that myself ….

Another idea she suggested was workshops – the gallery runs sessions for clients with artists, as an opportunity to share skills and spread reputations – which I could do, probably quite easily for some of the smaller items – such as those I’d consider writing up blog tutorials for, but that’s a big step for me because of the social element, so I’ll think on that one for a while. It could be a future option, as is expanding on my projected (unpaid) session at Honey’s school with the after-school art group. Though I’m not sure whether I actually *want* to teach anyone of any age, it’s an idea that’s kicking around inside my head to the extent I’ve got an outline progressive 6-week course for 3 different levels of age/experience which I’ve committed to paper. Location is a big issue, though, because I really don’t think I want my house invading on a regular basis (that would mean I need to TIDY UP ). Still, it’s an idea, and one that I might find a way to work in one form or another ….

All in all, a fair amount to think about. It’s been a big seismic shift in thinking about the business, and about how seriously I take it – in the grand scheme of “things I want to do with my life”, it’s high up on the list and pretty much as non-negotiable as my writing. In that context, I need to make it a coherent and long-term viable business, and that means making sure I’m doing as much as I can to nurture and maintain it at all levels as I possibly can. If I don’t make it the best I can, no-one else is going to do the hard work for me.

And it looks like a little burst of hard work ahead for me. However, I believe it will be worth it. Wish me luck?

Robert Olmstead – Far Bright Star

(Algonquin Books, Paperback (First Edition), May 2009, ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-592-6)

 

Set in 1916, ‘Far Bright Star’ follows Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, as he leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into the mountains of Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong and the patrol is brutally attacked. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert.

Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield.

This is neither a comfortable nor an easy novel to read, but the lyrical, compelling voice pulled me in from the first sentence. That voice grew stronger until, within a couple of pages, even my unfamiliar ears were attuned to the narrator’s drawl and I could hear him as though he were stood next to me.  His story is not told in a conventional manner: the narrative is linear up to the defining, terrifying moment of capture, torture and abandonment, but then it twists and turns alongside the narrator as his experiences traverse the increasingly blurred boundaries between life and death, dream and reality, until past, present and future become inextricably tangled.

This complex unravelling of a consciousness could be interpreted as the representation of a man suffering from post-traumatic disorder (at a time when such a thing was not known to exist), a respected, hardened soldier experiencing one atrocity too many, the axes of physical recovery and mental collapse intersecting and then mirroring one another. Such an analysis offers an oblique look forward at the experiences of soldiers serving both in the First World War (the start of which ends this novel), and, moving forward still further, and in Afghanistan in the present day. Replace Pancho Villa with the Taliban, and you get the same sense of dread-laden and heat-drowned shadow-chasing in a hostile land.

However, the dense, vivid language, the rich, complex imagery hold echoes of magical realism, a sense of the fantastical that is reminiscent of a stripped-down Gabriel Garcia Marquez in its impossibilities, though without his more impenetrable excesses. Perhaps one should simply suspend one’s disbelief and accept the mystical, or perhaps mythological, qualities of the improbable rescue and recovery, and see this as a deeply personal telling of an experience from a man who does things his own way and sees things in a different light to the rest of us. His perception is his reality, and we should accept his translation of it for us.

But the reality he shows us is a bleak and stark analysis of war, in all its brutal, wasteful futility. The language may be evocative, luxurious and poetic, but such language forges a stark, telling contrast between its melodic beauty and the precise, horrific scenes Olmstead lays before us. You will not find here the glamorous, romantic stuff of Hollywood-slick spaghetti westerns, nor the idealised cameraderie and nobility of Zane Grey and Fennimore Cooper. This novel is unflinching in its exposure of the base ugliness, boredom and terror of a war of attrition in a hostile land, of the resigned disgust of soldiers who must carry out the flawed plans of distant political masters whose strategy takes no account of the human cost of their miscalculations. The heat and dust and stench of it seep into you, and, trapped in a web of sensory lyricism, it is impossible to look away and ignore the grisly outrage that concludes the betrayal and destruction of Napoleon’s small troop.

This is not a comfortable novel to read. It is a haunting, disturbing unfolding of a man disintegrating under unbearable pressure, but in a story of contrasts, of language and image, of illusion and reality, of myth and truth, he makes a sort of peace within himself. By submitting himself to war, he allows himself to accept that war has both destroyed and forged his identity and that war gives him life just as much as it threatens that same life. 

It is not an understanding easily grasped, a single reading will not suffice. Detail will catch and nag and draw you back until you move through stunned, mesmerised revulsion to uncomprehending grief to silent acceptance. It is worth the journey to get there. Read it.

Disconnection: dissected

Out of clutter

find Simplicity

From discord

find Harmony

In the middle of difficulty

Lies Opportunity

(Albert Einstein)

I finished the rewrite of Disconnection last week. To say it’s a relief to finish it would be an understatement – the level of writing-discipline involved in a rework of that scale – virtually a rebuild from the ground up, as the themes and structure changed so much from the terrible first draft AND an entirely new sub-story needed to come in – is way beyond what I’d normally exercise, and much more demanding than the wild scrawls of a first draft. Not just in terms of actively shaping and controlling the direction of the story along the planned revision lines, but also in terms of trying to stop the ‘bad habits’ I’ve been picked up on in critiques of previously completed works. Still, it’s a buzz that it’s done, and I can call that a closure and put it aside for a couple of months to let the wounds heal and the emotions subside before I come back for the edits. It’s just too raw, right now.

Disconnection: Kultmagick (Flickr commons)

Learning something new means nothing unless you look back and measure its success. (Alex Fayle, Someday Syndrome).

So, the stats: 46 days elapsed time, start to finish, but only 20 days actual writing. So, between burnouts, illnesses and visitors, I had 26 unproductive days in amongst the writing programme.

Total words in this draft, 57,397.  Average words per day, over the elapsed time: 1,248 wpd. Over actual writing days, 2,870. However, because I switched from a two scene per day writing basis to a single scene-per-day basis, I dropped from a 3k wpd average to a 2k wpd average when I changed methodology.

Going forward, I think I will be using scenes rather than raw wordcount to measure progress – I think it is more productive and makes me focus more on the *story* rather than on just throwing words at the page (and hoping some of them will stick ).

Working on a two-scene -per-day (c.3k words per day) basis was painful and exhausting and led to the need to take long breaks from the MS, and actually meant it took longer, start-to-finish, than if I’d worked 1 scene per day on a consistent, daily basis.

One scene per day felt comfortable, and gave me enough time around the main deep-writing session for wind-up and wind-down activities like blogging and critiquing and other exercises in writing and/or communication. It’s worth noting that if I’d written consistently on a 1-scene-per-day basis, the elapsed time would have been 34 days start-to-finish, and I would have been done before we had the nightmare week-of-illness.

Writing to an outline, note-carded plan worked well for this novel, and I will use it again going forward. What I need to know for my planning processes, is that my average scene is around 1800 words. On that basis, an average 80k word novel will need 44 scenes, and on the basis of writing a scene per day, take 44 days to write. Probably, it should be called closer to 50, since I know it’s inevitable that my life will detonate bombs of some sort during a period of such long duration Sometimes, it will take me much longer. The Sere novel, for example, I have already note-carded, and is sitting at some 68 scenes – that will come out at approx 122k words, which is perhaps a little heavy, but more-or-less in line with the average for the genre. It will, however, take me significantly longer than the month I originally scheduled for it.

This draft of Disconnection, however, has come out a little lighter than I expected – at 34 scenes the average words per scene is closer to 1700 words than my normal 18oo, but I know that I have some scenes that are so dialogue-heavy that there is almost no supporting description, and that, obviously, will need to be addressed. What it does tell me, however, is that if the story is driven so heavily by the dialogue, then character interactions are CENTRAL to the novel. That means I need to make sure that the background detail I add, including supporting character mannerisms and body language etc, needs to be in line with those interactions and enhance them rather than distract. I shall be adding that to the list of things I need to watch for when I do get to the edit pass, later this year. Other things on the list are:

• diffusing the opening of scenes with pointless and confusing ’setting’ description
• adverb & passive voice abuse/laziness
• coherence and completion of individual story arcs
• is the conflict/tension/action close enough to the surface of the story, or have I gone too far in subtlety?
• where have I chickened out of really digging into the dark stuff to nail this story?

It’s a fair old list, but I’ve got some bad habits ….

Looking slightly more broadly, Disconnection has taught me that:

1. I need the space to breathe and play around the intense writing phase of my session, particularly with a novel like this one which goes deeper and darker than anything I’ve written before. As well as giving me a little relief from the hard mental and emotional slog, it also releases me from accumulating stress and frustration around associated writerly activities like reading, reviewing, critiquing others’ work and, of course, the short story administrative workload.
2. I need to disconnect from all distractions and be disciplined about staying disconnected from them until I do hit the session or day’s targets. Added to that, I need a clearly defined start time, otherwise I can fritter time away on non-essential warm-up tasks and end up starting too late to be properly productive.
3. I need more sleep. The days I went to bed at 11:30 pm made for much better next days – more energy, more enthusiasm, more productive and better motivation and focus.

I feel that bringing these things into my planning will allow me to be more realistic about the goals I set myself, and that more realistic planning will make for greater happiness – I will reduce frustration and stress about the targets not hit and the projects not completed when I wanted them to be done.

For now, I must also take on board the understanding that I’ not really comfortable if I have *nothing* to do. I need goals and structure in my life, though I’m not sure why that is, and I’m not entirely convinced that my inability to sit still and just ’stand and stare’ (to quote W H Davies) is a healthy thing.  That is not going to be easy, but then, nothing worthwhile ever is.

There are limits

I’m a little late with this week’s blog post, and it’s because last week I was forced to admit that I am human, and that I can’t carry on with the insane hours and schedule that I’d been trying to maintain.

I need to step back and take things a little easier on myself.

This all came about, I suppose, because I signed up for the newsletter over at Alex Fayle’s Someday Syndrome and received ‘84 tips to avoid procrastination’. Now, I don’t know if Alex works some kind of weird voodoo, or if my subconscious is trying to tell me something (OK, I’ll admit the latter is more likely ), but all the random tips I’ve pulled out in the last week have had huge, meteor-like impacts on my life and forced me to step back and reassess what it is that I’m doing, and what’s important to me.

It’s difficult to step back when you’re on the edge.

There’s been a certain amount of emotional freefall, and it’s all been very draining, and I keep coming back to the realisation that my inability to communicate is at the root of a lot of my frustrations with life, relationships and myself, and that I need to do something to defuse all the pent-up anger building up inside me before it gets truly toxic. When I get into phases like this, I don’t help myself by retreating into the cave of my skull and isolating myself physically and emotionally from the world in general, and more particularly from everyone surrounding me. Effectively, I turn my glass wall into concrete and become just about as accessible as if I really was inside a bunker.

Which, of course, doesn’t help either me or anyone else.

Things all came to a head on Friday evening: my thought for the day had been “sometimes, no matter how hard you try to make something happen, your body/brain just won’t do it.” And on Friday night, my physical isolation and emotional shutdown – a kind of self-imposed internal exile – translated itself into a physical reality, an almost total shutdown - I crashed. I got Bellaboo to bed, went to my room to fetch a cardigan because I felt cold, sat down on the bed for a moment and woke up two hours later.

I have never felt so exhausted in my entire life. An exhaustion that went bone-deep, aching in every joint, with no energy, blacker and bleaker than the deepest depression hole I’ve ever fallen into, and that took everything I had out and left me with nothing.

It’s taken me four days of taking everything *very* easy to get back to any semblance of normality, and even now I’m living a very pared down existence, focussing only on the most important tasks and working literally day-to-day. I have to thank Goddess Leonie’s Zen Habits poster for that, certainly in terms of disconnecting from distractions and getting back to basics.

I’m gradually starting to bring things back online, but slowly and carefully, with very careful planning of each day, down to breaking it all into half-hourly chunks of tasks and rest and play and monitoring their effect on me. So far it’s going OK, but I’m having to resist the urge to push myself at every turn. Tonight was my first night back at writing, and I restricted myself to a single scene on Disconnection. It went well, but I stopped and cut off the desire to keep working at it. I’ll work the next scene tomorrow, and then 1 scene a night until it’s done, and I’m hoping I can sustain that pace, fingers crossed.

The period of recovery and reflection and readjustment of routine has highlighted a couple of important areas that I need to address:

1. My inability to communicate, not just with general people, but with people in my key relationships, is not something I can ignore any more. It’s starting to have a major impact on my life, and though I’ve talked about it and acknowledged it a while ago (here), I haven’t done anything about it. Now I need to take action, so I’ve referred myself back for counselling because this is not something I can do on my own. (And recognising that is an enormous step forward, for me).
2. I need to understand why I feel so driven, that I set myself these massive targets, and why I have such monstrous lists of writing and textile projects I want to do. What is the rush? Why do I need to charge through it all? What do I need to change so that the process and the learning in each task is something to be enjoyed and savoured rather than hurdles to be passed as quick as possible in a mad dash to – where? what? I know what’s important to me, I know where I want to go. It took me 10 years to build a career in the Finance profession. Should I be surprised that it takes any less time to do the same in other fields? Will taking my time over what I commit to do save me time in the longer run in terms of both lessons properly learnt AND less need for reworks? I think and hope so, but to make this change is a big shift of perspective and outlook for me, and not something I can make happen overnight. If I can understand what need is driving me, then perhaps I can change it. A slower life might be more satisfying, instead of always feeling under the cosh of time.

There are limits to what I can do, and I have to recognise that and adjust my plans and expectations accordingly, otherwise I fear that longer-term health issues will force me to make that adjustment whether I like it or not.

What happened on Friday was a warning.

I think I need to listen to it.